Below are a couple of articles. One features CFL football - its titled The Canadian Game is Both Beautiful and Unique. The second is titled Fewer People Are Watching the NFL Because the Games Have Been Lousy.
They are both worth a read.
The Canadian game is both beautiful and unique
Adam Gagnon/CFL.ca
Canadian football can be strange.
I played it for 10 years and watched the CFL with a close eye from a strangely young age. I’ve spent countless hours either in a film room educating myself on the game or sitting in front of a television hearing Chris Cuthbert and Glen Suitor explain the rules and their implications.
Yet still, once or twice a season, we are served a reminder just how unique our game is.
It’s easy to forget all the intricacies of Canadian football which separate it from or american counter parts. Yes the field is bigger. Yes the field goal posts are at the front of the end zone, but it’s far more than that.
My most recent reminder of how strange and beautiful the Canadian game can be came in Week 17 in Toronto on the last play of the first half.
Argos quarterback Drew Willy caught my eye at first for evading about six different Saskatchewan Roughriders in the pocket. This could have been a headline on its own as Willy has struggled to feel pressure and manoeuvre the pocket since donning double blue, but what followed next was a slice of Canadianity as thick as grandma’s family famous apple pie.
It doesn’t matter what your citizenship says; if you break the line of scrimmage and try to throw the football you will not be successful. Instead of throwing, Willy, realizing all his receivers had run vertically, kicked the ball.
For anyone new to the Canadian game: you didn’t read that wrong. He punted the ball — a quarterback, after escaping the pocket.
Of course, before laying laces to pigskin, Willy did the sensible thing… look around quickly to:
A. Make sure he was not about to get his clock and all relevant time related trackers cleaned.
B. See if anyone was onside.
Sadly, the quality of this play’s end did not come anywhere close to matching the spectacular plot twists and climax of the start and middle.
Receiver Kenny Shaw picked up the ball in a rather confused and seemingly uneducated manner, which of course resulted in a touchdown signal revoked by a ‘no yards’ call since Shaw was forty yards ahead of Willy when he punted the ball away.
Again, for those of you new to the room, any player behind the ‘kicking player’ — be it quarterback, punter or receiver — is eligible to recover the kick and be awarded at the spot of the recovery. Those ahead of the kick are ‘off-side’ and do not have the ability to recover said kick.
A lot of people find explaining these situations and nuances annoying and even embarrassing sometimes. A regular play in the Canadian Football League can at times look like the zaniest thing you ever saw from your favourite 1980’s football follies VHS and that can push people away, but I love it.
It’s who we are. It’s what makes us different. If you’re looking to watch fair catches without exciting returns, there are plenty of places to search that out. If you enjoy seeing teams have no option but to attempt a 65-yard field goal when tied at the end of a game instead of attempting to crush a punt out the back of the end zone for a single point and subsequent victory, you can find that wherever you want.
Drew Willy reminded me that weekend just how random and sporadic our unique plays can look to the uneducated, which reminds me of my only CFL special teams meeting experience.
I was a part of the CIS-CFL quarterback internship program while playing at McMaster University. I travelled to Calgary and sat in on a little bit of every meeting to get a feel for the game and its inner workings.
In the second team meeting, special teams coordinator Mark Kilam got up introduced himself and told the rookies to strap in for five minutes. He proceeded to use game footage as visual evidence of Canadian football’s possibilities.
The Montreal-Toronto kick-out scenario from a couple years ago; no yards; returning missed field goals — it was all put on the table for this new group of CFL blood.
They weren’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I actually had one rookie tap me on the shoulder as the resident maple leaf flag waver and ask me, “is this a joke” in order to validate what he was seeing, to which I calmly responded, “nope, I actually won my grade 12 city high school championship game with that single point on a punt thing.”
No, it’s not a joke. It’s Canadian football and when players laugh and ignore the importance of those meetings, we end up laughing at them for not knowing our rules such as Kenny Shaw on Saturday.
Games can be won or lost based on these crazy situations and coaches would do well to refresh their teams on the rules ahead of the playoffs. Heaven forbid we should have a solid player such as Kenny Shaw make a mistake which decides a team’s season.
I would hate for everyone in Canada to be screaming at their televisions as a player failed to understand our unique rules. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t hate it, because it would remind us all just how different our game can be, and that’s a good thing.
Prime-time duds and 6-6 ties: Fewer people are watching the NFL because the games have been lousy
At the start of the fourth quarter of the NFL’s Monday night game, Houston’s Brock Osweiler performed a one-man play titled “The Problem with the National Football League in 2016.”
OK, not really. What Osweiler did was drop back to pass, cock his right arm, and somehow drop the ball just as he was about to bring it forward. The resulting 10-yard heave to no one in particular looked like an incomplete pass, but was ruled a fumble because Osweiler lost control of the ball before he threw it.
It was a play of such rare ineptness that no one on either side of the ball grasped what had happened, with everyone just assuming the ball was dead, even Denver cornerback Chris Harris, who collected it on a bounce and had a clear path to the end zone. Their confusion was understandable: who drops a ball, untouched, and also manages to throw it 10 yards?
But the Osweiler play, as mentioned, was also a neat encapsulation of this wet firecracker of an NFL season, where key television ratings have dropped significantly and the previously invulnerable shield is showing a few cracks. Many theories have been offered for the decline, but Osweiler’s botching of a routine play underscores the most accurate explanation: the NFL is currently providing a lousy product.
Other reasons have been offered. The presidential election has stolen some audience, which is fair on nights when a debate was directly competing with an NFL game, and less relevant on nights with no live election event. One survey suggested people were less likely to watch NFL games because certain players were protesting racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem.
Those polls, to use a technical term, sound like codswallop: No one has ever watched a football game for the anthem, unless they have wagered on its length in the Super Bowl.
There is a theory that concerns over concussions are finally having a tangible impact, but nothing has happened in the past six months to make that issue any more top-of-mind than it was three seasons ago, when ratings were still booming. And none of those arguments explain why the NFL’s ratings on Sundays are stagnant but have declined precipitously in prime-time hours — double-digit percentage drops on Thursdays, Sunday nights, and Mondays.
People who don’t mind watching men be concussed at 4 p.m. would not suddenly have a problem with it at 8:30.
No, it’s a simpler explanation, and one that can be seen by looking at the NFL’s prime-time schedule through seven weeks. Of the 22 games that were televised in standalone slots, I count five that were compelling match-ups, and that number generously includes Sunday night’s Seattle-Arizona slog, a game that finished 6-6 after overtime.
The teams did not score three safeties apiece, but it would have been fitting. I looked the game up on the NFL’s website just now, and the highlight loop was, honestly: holding penalty, incomplete pass, holding penalty, incomplete pass. Feel the excitement!
It some cases, the appeal of a game was hurt by missing stars — Tom Brady, Cam Newton and Tony Romo have all been out for prime-time games — but in many more, one or both of the teams were just objectively bad. The Chicago Bears have been on prime-time three times already this season. The Chicago Bears are awful. Houston has had three prime-time games and their two best players are J.J. Watt (out for the year) and DeAndre Hopkins (quarterback who drops the ball for no good reason).
One can’t entirely blame the NFL’s schedulers for picking so many prime-time lemons, since there is a such a dearth of great teams. New England, with Brady back from exile, is one. Then, um, Dallas? Minnesota and Denver, maybe, though they are presently led by Sam Bradford and Trevor Siemian (note: actual person). With so many mediocre-to-bad teams, it’s inevitable that at least one of a given week’s prime-time offerings will include a dud.
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For the NFL, this is a serious problem, because for years it has built itself into the league of interchangeable parts. The salary cap, and the parity it forced, meant teams were always dropping players, even stars, and picking up replacements on the cheap. Other than the handful of players who were faces of the game, the key selling point was the event itself, that you could tune in to whatever game happened to be on and find a reason to stick around.
Now, the games are much less attractive, and the next generation of stars after Peyton Manning and Brady is hard to identify.
Remember when Colin Kaepernick and Robert Griffin III were going to revolutionize the sport?
There’s something cultural going on here, too. Attention spans are shorter, and there are many other distractions competing with a three-hour game. But this would be much less of a problem for the NFL if the games were, you know, good. The viewership numbers suggest that people are still watching NFL games, but for less time.
The Week 7 prime-time games were a Green Bay blowout of the Bears, the Arizona-Seattle tie and Denver’s dismantling of tall, incompetent Brock Osweiler.
You can’t really blame America for finding something better to do.
